BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – The University of Vermont Medical Center may soon be able to perform thousands more surgeries each year — welcome news in a state where people with failing joints and other painful ailments often wait months for relief. All it will take is $130 million and a green light from state regulators.
The Burlington hospital is asking the Green Mountain Care Board for permission to build a state-of-the-art outpatient surgery center that could accommodate up to a dozen new operating rooms. Hospital leaders say the move would allow them to shift outpatient procedures away from the outdated Fanny Allen campus and begin to chip away at persistent backlogs.
The prospect of Vermont’s largest health care system grabbing an even bigger share of the market has worried some cash-strapped rural hospitals, which rely on revenue from outpatient surgeries to stay afloat. But UVM Medical Center execs say there’s enough business to go around. They project that by 2030, the hospital will need to perform upwards of 23,000 surgeries every year — 4,000 more than it can currently handle.
Darren Perron spoke with Seven Days’ Colin Flanders, who wrote about the story in this week’s issue.